In the 2020s, urban homelessness will spread from blue cities into red ones.
In the wake of many challenges for urban centers, red states and cities will need solutions too.
H omelessness tends to be closely associated with blue-state dysfunction. New York City, California, and communities in the Pacific Northwest are truly defined by their struggles with homelessness. In these places, homelessness topped surveys of public concern before Covid-19, and it continues to do so now.
But in the 2020s, we are likely to see concerns over homelessness increase and become more politically salient in mid-sized American cities off the coasts. This will happen because of the normalization of remote work, along with demographic decline.
Having fewer people headed into the office every day has given many city downtowns a movie-set feel. In cities such as Indianapolis and Atlanta (both of which I recently visited), the office buildings themselves aren’t derelict; neither are they half-collapsed, like a long-closed steel plant. But where are all the people? That’s the first question a visitor to the average city downtown on a weekday will ask.
Of course, addressing diminished vitality has been a focus of city governments going back decades. Downtowns were hit hard by post-war suburbanization plus retail’s flight, first from department stores to suburban malls and then later to online. But local elites resisted giving up on downtown and pushed strategies to revitalize central business districts.
Popular ideas included convention centers, sports stadiums, and urban malls, accompanied in most cases by generous tax-break schemes. Many plans focused on trying to squeeze more economic activity out of workers who came to downtown offices every day. Instead of everyone fleeing home to the suburbs at 5:00 p.m., urban planners envisioned an “18-hour day,” five days a week. But as a legacy of the pandemic, hosting workers for even eight hours a day, just two to three days a week, looks like a reach for many cities.
Another revitalization idea, rooted in Richard Florida’s theory about the “Creative Class,” was to attract more people to live downtown. Downtown had historically been a center of commerce, but not so much of housing. Residential strategies focused on young college graduates, but now these schemes are threatened by the fact that the American fertility rate has been below replacement for about 15 years. With fewer high-school graduates now in the pipeline, the higher-education sector is expecting a historic disruption during the 2020s. There is less awareness of the risk of disruption in the urban-planning sector, but if your city hasn’t become a hipster paradise by now, it probably never will.
Which brings me to homelessness. It is insufficiently appreciated how much crowds help manage homelessness. Government solutions rely on a mix of law enforcement, social services, and housing. But what really helps to keep homelessness-related disorder in check is a strong, consistent presence of non-homeless people. If that solution is unavailing — say, because demographic decline and remote work have left a vacuum on downtown streets — governments will have to engage.
Neglect won’t be an option. Left unaddressed, street homelessness tends to expand. Twenty-person encampments have a way of becoming 40-person encampments. Perhaps cities in red states, or red-state governments themselves, will become proactive, determined to avoid letting their burgeoning crises reach the insane proportions witnessed in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. In the cases of Texas and Missouri, there is evidence that this is already happening. Prevention is, to be sure, recommended above all in managing homelessness.
But red-state jurisdictions have never been tested as California has, so we don’t know for sure how they will fare. Sometimes low-level disorder can be more vexing to deal with than serious crime. One recent survey of 126 mayors reported that, while over 70 percent perceive themselves as being held highly accountable to the public on homelessness, only about 20 percent believe they have “a lot” or “a great deal” of control over the issue. No one should underestimate courts’ ability to tie a city’s hands on homelessness policy. The public won’t be satisfied by good intentions alone: That goes both for the housing-oriented response favored by progressives and the law-enforcement-oriented response favored by conservatives.
If homelessness becomes more of a priority in the heartland, it will become more of a priority for federal lawmakers too. Framing homelessness as mainly a problem for progressive cities has had the unfortunate consequence of granting ownership of homelessness policy to progressives. At the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, going back many years, programs stressing work and sobriety have been out, and programs stressing no-strings-attached redistribution of housing resources have been in. This has happened with the tacit consent of conservatives. More recently, though, congressional Republicans, such as Kentucky’s Representative Andy Barr, architect of the Housing Promotes Livelihood and Ultimate Success (Housing PLUS) Act, have become engaged on homelessness. This will continue if homelessness controversies keep spreading and can’t be satisfactorily dealt with by local means alone.
Downtown-revitalization master plans generally stress economic fundamentals such as jobs, tax revenues, etc. In truth, though, revitalization has always been about civic pride. Sometimes a perceived increase in homelessness may really just be a shift from one neighborhood to another, or a previously dispersed population concentrating in one central location. With questions of civic pride, though, perception is reality. A downtown that exists mainly for the use of the local homeless population won’t be one in which the community can take much pride.